Computing Research Policy Blog

S&E Supply Up, Unemployment Down in 2006, Says NSF

The latest data from the National Science Foundation reveal that there were more science and engineering graduates in the U.S. in 2006 than there were in 2003 and that there appears to be plenty of opportunity for those graduates in the S&E workforce. NSF and US News detail the results of three recent studies released by NSF that indicate this "strong labor market for scientists and engineers."

According to the studies, the number of individuals working in science and engineering (S&E) occupations grew by 4.3 percent between 2003 and 2006, while their unemployment rate dropped to 2.5 percent in 2006, its lowest since the early 1990s. "On the supply side, we can say that the current S&E labor force is expanding, new graduates are coming out, and people are able to find employment, or are continuing their education," says Nimmi Kannankutty, the National Science Foundation (NSF) program manager responsible for compiling the data, which NSF released last month.

For a look at all the data, see:

• Unemployment Rate of U.S. Scientists and Engineers Drops to Record Low 2.5% in 2006
  
• An Overview of Science, Engineering and Health Graduates: 2006
  
• NSF's Divison of Science Resources Statistics (SRS)
  
• Employment and Salaries of Recent CS Graduates

Gates Tells Congress to Support Research

“Research is where it’s at,” Bill Gates said yesterday summing up his (and CRA's, in fact) message for federal funding priorities in a single sentence to the House Science and Technology Committee. The response came in the final minutes of the hearing when Gates was asked what the priority for federal funding should be given that there is a finite amount of federal money to spend and the large number of potential science and technology areas it could be spent on.

Gates’ appearance before the committee, his last as Chairman of Microsoft, was in commemoration of the committee’s 50th anniversary. The theme of the hearing was familiar to those in the science and technology realm—Competitiveness and Innovation. Gates’ testimony, both written and in response to questions, followed the arguments he and the rest of the S&T community have been making for the last several years: the urgency for improving STEM education at the K-12 level, the critical need for federal funding of basic research, the importance of attracting the best and the brightest from around the world to U.S. universities, the need to increase diversity in STEM fields, and the requirement that we do whatever we can to retain talent in the U.S.

The entire written testimony and a webcast of the hearing are available on the committee web site. In it, Gates, not unexpectedly, highlights the important contributions of information technology and its great potential to aid in solving some of the trickiest problems we face:

Computing and software will also play an increasingly central role in scientific research. We are rapidly moving into an era of data-centric computational science in which researchers across a wide range of disciplines routinely use software and computers as essential tools for investigation and collaboration. The ability to use computers to model complex systems is transforming the way we learn about everything from genomics and biosciences to physics and astronomy. In the future, scientific computing will play a profoundly important role in advances that will help us treat diseases, address climate change, and confront many other critical issues.

As I hope these remarks reflect, I am optimistic about the potential for technology to help us find new ways to improve people’s lives and tackle important challenges. I am less optimistic, however, that the United States will continue to remain a global leader in technology innovation. While America’s innovation heritage is unparalleled, the evidence is mounting that we are failing to make the investments in our young people, our workers, our scientific research infrastructure, and our economy that will enable us to retain our global innovation leadership.

In particular, I believe that there are two urgent reasons why we should all be deeply concerned that our advantages in science and technology innovation are in danger of slipping away.

First, we face a critical shortfall of skilled scientists and engineers who can develop new breakthrough technologies. Second, the public and private sectors are no longer investing in basic research and development (R&D) at the levels needed to drive long-term innovation.

If the United States truly wants to secure its global leadership in technology innovation, we must, as a nation, commit to a strategy for innovation excellence – a set of initiatives and policies that will provide the foundation for American competitive strength in the years ahead. Such a strategy cannot succeed without a serious commitment from – and partnership between – both the public and private sectors. It will also need to be flexible and dynamic enough to respond to rapid changes in the global economy.

Update: Some press coverage of the hearing from Forbes, the Washington Post, and one in Inforworld (though the latter focuses almost exclusively on Gates' H-1B testimony).

Gates to Testify Before Congress on Innovation

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates will testify before the House Science and Technology Committee tomorrow morning to "share his thoughts on efforts needed to further strengthen our country’s competitiveness in the global marketplace, discuss what policies are needed to encourage innovation, and address the role of technology in our country’s economic growth." (That's according to the hearing charter (pdf)). The hearing is the first in a series planned by House S&T to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the committee, created in the wake of the shock of Sputnik (an event that also motivated the creation of DARPA and NASA and triggered an rapid increase in federal science funding). Expect Gates to talk about the importance of this federal support for fundamental research in driving the nation's incredibly successful innovation ecosystem over that time.

The committee will webcast the 10 am ET hearing from a URL that will be available here, where you can also find the hearing charter and some related information. We'll have our reaction to the testimony here following the hearing.

Interest in Computer Science Degrees Improving?

Data from CRA's own Taulbee Survey of PhD-granting computer science and computer engineering departments in North America shows that the number of newly declared CS majors has increased for the first time since the height of the dot-com boom in Fall 2000. This might indicate that interest in CS has stabilized after a long period of decline post-2000, writes Jay Vegso in the CRA Bulletin.

While the number of enrollments in undergraduate CS departments continues down among the CS departments surveyed, the increase in newly declared CS majors suggests that these highly-cyclical enrollments may be poised to exit their current trough in the coming years. The Taulbee numbers also show that though enrollments are down from Fall 2000 peak, enrollments are still above the pre-boom 1995 numbers.

CRA will release the full results from the Taulbee Survey in May.

There's good coverage of the release of the undergraduate info today in both Inside Higher Ed and Computerworld. Both are worth reading. And of course, Jay's got the full detail at the CRA Bulletin.

Update: Also, E-week.

Rick Adrion Recognized for Distinguished Service to Computing Community

CRA's Distinguished Service Award is presented annually to a person who has made an outstanding service contribution to the computing research community. The award recognizes service in the areas of government affairs, professional societies, publications or conferences, and leadership that has a major impact on computing research.

The CRA Board of Directors has selected W. Richards (Rick) Adrion, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, to receive its 2008 Distinguished Service Award.

Adrion was recognized for his sustained record of effective and significant service contributions spanning more than two decades. He has played a key role in building, nurturing and shaping today’s computer science community. Among these contributions are leadership in the development of the Internet; leadership in setting strategic directions at the National Science Foundation; leadership in developing a stronger political voice for computer science in national politics; leadership in strengthening the software engineering community; leadership in strengthening, modernizing and invigorating computing and information technology programs in Massachusetts public higher education; and overall service to the computer science community. Rick Adrion was general chair of the first ACM/CRB Conference on Strategic Directions in Computing. He also played a leadership role in the formation of CRA and was an active board member for many years, serving on the Executive Committee and Government Affairs Committee.

Rick Adrion is Professor of Computer Science at UMass Amherst, Co-Director of RIPPLES, Co-Director of the Commonwealth Information Technology Initiative (CITI), and Director of CRICCS. He served as Division Director for Experimental and Integrated Activities in the NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) from January 2000 through August 2002 and as a part-time Senior Advisor in CISE until September 2003.

CRA Selects Richard Ladner as 2008 A. Nico Habermann Award Winner

CRA's A. Nico Habermann Award is usually presented annually to a person who has made outstanding contributions aimed at increasing the numbers and/or successes of underrepresented members in the computing research community. It honors the late A. Nico Habermann, who headed NSF's Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate and who was deeply committed to increasing the participation of women and underrepresented minorities in computing research.

The CRA board has selected Richard E. Ladner, Boeing Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, to receive the 2008 Habermann Award. Professor Ladner is recognized for his lifelong, strong and persistent advocacy on behalf of people with disabilities in the computing community.

Ladner's contributions have taken three forms: mentoring of students, research both with and for persons with disabilities, and national advocacy. He is known for his dedicated, one-on-one mentoring of students (both with and without disabilities). Over the past 15 summers, he has worked with 38 severely disabled high school students on week-long summer projects in computing. Ladner has also mentored undergraduates and graduate students with disabilities, often working with them on assistive technology research. His assistive technology efforts have resulted in networking (remote login, email) for Seattle's deaf-blind community, large-print user interfaces for Unix machines, video compression algorithms that are tailored to American Sign Language and simple enough to implement in real-time on a cell phone, and new image processing and enhancement algorithms to convert graphical images--diagrams in math and science textbooks--into tactile images.

Richard Ladner currently co-leads the NSF-sponsored AccessComputing Alliance, a national effort to increase the number of students with disabilities majoring in computing. As part of their effort, the Alliance hosts workshops and summer camps around the country, and Ladner has run many of these, including a three-day Vertical Mentoring Workshop for the Blind in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, and a nine-week summer camp for deaf students. Ladner has also been tireless in his advocacy at the national level: he has spoken to many groups, including department chairs at the CRA Conference at Snowbird, and worked with organizations and departments (through AccessComputing's communities of practice) to make it easier for students with disabilities to fully participate.

CRA-E in the Chronicle

Andries van Dam, the newly appointed chair of the Computing Research Association Education Committee (CRA-E), is already hard at work getting the word out about the problems of computing education. He spoke to the Chronicle of Higher Education about the concerns and the future work necessary.

Computing Education and the Infinite Onion

[The following guest post by CRA Chair Dan Reed originally appeared on Dan's blog, Reed's Ruminations. We're pleased to repost it here.]

Much has been written about declining enrollments in computer science, the image of computing among secondary school students, and the depressingly small numbers of women and minorities enrolled in computer science programs. There are many opinions about the root causes of our enrollment problems and at least as many opinions about possible solutions. The reality of the problem is not in dispute, however.

Slicing the Infinite Onion

As I reflect on the past thirty years of computer science curricula and my experience as both a student and a professor, I am often struck by how little has changed. The core elements of our curricula remain centered on formal languages and theory, data structures, programming languages and compilers, operating systems and computer architecture. These are the courses I took as an undergraduate in the 1970s, and we still teach their evolutionary variants today.

Around continuous and discrete mathematics, physical and biological science and this computing core, we have added successive layers to the computing curriculum onion: graphics and human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, mobile and embedded devices, computational geometry, networks and distributed systems, numerical and scientific algorithms, parallel computing, databases and data mining, privacy and information security, just to name a few.

As this non-exhaustive list illustrates, the computing curriculum onion has grown ever larger and more complex, with each layer derived from new discoveries and technologies. I do not believe this expansion can continue indefinitely. Asymptotics do apply – the number of students will tend (indeed, is tending toward) zero as the knowledge and degree expectations approaches infinity. This must change.

Rethinking Computing Education

I believe we must rethink our computing education approaches in some deep and fundamental ways. First, as researchers and technologists we seek to reproduce students in our technical image, failing to acknowledge that most of our students will not develop compilers, write operating systems or design computer chips. Rather, they benefit from training in logical problem solving, knowledge of computing tools and their applicability to new domains.

In short, most of our graduates solve problems using computing rather than working in core computing technologies. We must recognize and embrace the universality of computing as a problem solving process and introduce computing via technically challenging and socially relevant problem domains.

The magic hierarchy of computing – from atoms to gates to bits to in-order instruction architecture and machine language to code translation to "hello world" was an attractive and emotionally enticing technology story to previous generations. It is often esoteric and off-putting to a generation of students reared on ubiquitous computing technology.

This does not mean we should eviscerate the intellectual core of computing. Rather, we must emphasize relevance and introduce computing as a means to solve problems. Show the importance of computing to elections and voting, energy management and eco-friendly design, health care and quality of life.

Second, we struggle to accept the fact that not every student needs detailed knowledge of every computing specialization. If I were to draw a tortured analogy with the history of automobile, drivers need not understand combustion dynamics, the stiff ODE solutions underlying antilock brakes or superheterodyne radio engineering. Drivers do need to understand how to operate a car safely and recognize the high-level principles underlying that operation.

All of this suggests we should create multiple educational tracks that emphasis the disparate aspects of computing, layered atop a smaller, common core. Of course, I could be wrong – I often am.

CRA-E Committee

To explore the future of computing education, CRA has chartered a new committee, CRA-E (E for education), chaired by Brown professor Andries (Andy) van Dam. The new committee seeks to understand how the broad computing community needs to move forward in order to develop principles and philosophy underlying the computing education of the future. As I noted in the press release:

I am delighted that Professor van Dam has agreed to service as the initial chair of CRA-E. Not only is Andy a distinguished and respected researcher, he is passionate about computing education, both its theory and its practice. Moreover, he has long worked to apply novel technologies to computing education.

ACM Announces 2007 Turing Award Winners

Congratulations to Edmund M. Clarke of Carnegie Mellon, E. Allen Emerson of UT-Austin, and Joseph Siafkis of Verimag Laboratory in France, on being awarded ACM's 2007 A.M. Turing award, the highest honor in computing, for their work on a quality assurance process known as Model Checking!

ACM has all the details in their press release.

Computer and Mathematical Science Occupations Expected to Grow Quickest Over the Next Decade

The new Bureau of Labor Statistics labor projections are out for the 2006-2016 period, and once again, despite concerns over the impact of globalization, computing-related occupations are still projected to grow the quickest among all "professional and related occupations." According to BLS projections, computer and mathematical science occupations are expected to grow by about 24 percent over the next decade, a rate that would add 822,000 new jobs to the field. Those 822,000 new jobs are third only to "Health care practitioners and technical occupations" (1,423,000 new jobs, a 19.8 percent growth rate) and "Education, training and library" occupations (1,265,000 new jobs, a 14 percent growth rate).

The Labor Department projections found that even though the growth rate for computer and mathematical science occupations has slowed compared to the previous decade -- as the industry matures and "routine work is outsourced overseas" -- strong growth in other aspects of computing will continue to create increasing opportunities in the field.

Computer and mathematical science occupations are projected to add 822,000 jobs—at 24.8 percent, the fastest growth among the eight professional subgroups. The demand for computer-related occupations will increase in almost all industries as organizations continue to adopt and integrate increasingly sophisticated and complex technologies. Growth will not be as rapid as during the previous decade, however, as the software industry begins to mature and as routine work is outsourced overseas. About 291,000—or 35 percent—of all new computer and mathematical science jobs are anticipated to be in the computer systems design and related services industry. The management, scientific, and technical consulting services industry is projected to add another 86,000 computer and mathematical science jobs. This expected 93-percent increase is due to the growing need for consultants to handle issues such as computer network security. Self-employment among computer and mathematical workers is anticipated to increase 19 percent, with most growth appearing among network systems and data communications analysts.

• Computer software engineers, application;
• Computer systems analysts;
• and Network systems and data communication analysts.

You can view most of the detail, including information about the methodology used, in the article titled, "Occupational employment projections to 2016" (pdf). The Monthly Labor Review Online has additional articles covering all aspects of the BLS' employment outlook.

Projections are notoriously difficult to get right, obviously, but it's encouraging to see that the opportunity that we in the community see in the field (that often runs counter to the *perceptions* of the field) appears to be echoed in these projections.

We'll have much more detail as we dig into the articles and data a bit more, so stay tuned....

Update: (12/7/2007) -- Here's one interesting cut of the data showing how the computer science job projections compare to the other science and engineering disciplines. (This is also a good excuse for me to try out Google's new Charts API.)

Berkeley to Hold a Tribute to Jim Gray

Computing pioneer Jim Gray, who went missing at sea January 28, 2007, and has not been found, will be honored with a tribute at U.C. Berkeley on March May 31, 2008. The tribute will have both a general session and a technical session. The technical session will feature presentations on a range of research areas important to Jim. The general session will focus on understanding Jim's impact on the field and on the community -- from his impact on Berkeley, his role as a mentor to colleagues, faculty and students, to his contributions to industry and to science. See the tribute home page for details of all the speakers.

Though the search for Jim Gray brought together an incredible array of people and technology -- almost all inspired by Jim or his work -- unfortunately he remains missing. After more than a year without him, this tribute seems like an appropriate way to honor and remember what Jim means to the discipline and to the community of science.

Dan Reed Heads to Microsoft Research

"Veteran supercomputing researcher" and current CRA Board Chair Dan Reed, will leave his position at the University of North Carolina's Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and join Microsoft Research on December 3rd, he announced today. From his blog post:

On December 3, I will embark on the next installment of my own future, which will place me in the center of the ever-evolving computing revolution. On that day, I will be joining Microsoft to head a new research initiative (see the Microsoft Research press release and RENCI/UNC press release) in scalable and multicore computing. I am enormously excited, as these are among the most interesting technical problems in computing, and they are my long-time professional interests. I will be working with Microsoft researchers and product developers, as well as industry partners and academics. It doesn’t get any cooler than this.

CRA Board Members Elected AAAS Fellows

A current and several former CRA Board members have been elected as Fellows to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Section on Information, Computing, and Communication this month. A ceremony honoring them will be held in February 2008 at the AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston. Fellows are elected by their peers for their contributions to science and technology. A full list of the Fellows can be found here.

Current CRA Board member Andrew A. Chien, vice president of Intelís Corporate Technology Group and director of Intel research, is also a fellow of the ACM and the IEEE. He was formerly a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Former Board members, John L. King, David A. Patterson, and Stuart Feldman, were also elected AAAS Fellows. John is the Vice Provost for Academic Information and a professor at the University of Michigan as well as a fellow of the Association for Information Systems. He is formerly a Fulbright Distinguished Chair. Dave is the E.H. and M.E. Pardee Chair of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley and is a fellow of the ACM and IEEE. He also received the CRA Distinguished Service Award. Stu is currently the Vice President, Engineering, East Coast at Google, a position he took recently after his time as Vice President of Computer Science at IBM Research. He is a fellow of the ACM and IEEE and is currently the president of ACM.

Congratulations Andrew, John, Dave, and Stu!

AAAS Section on Information, Computing, and Communication Fellows
Werner Braun, University of Texas Medical Branch ï C. Sidney Burrus, Rice University ï Jin-Yi Cai, University of Wisconsin-Madison ï Andrew A. Chien, Intel Corporation ï Tom Dietterich, Oregon State University ï Stuart I. Feldman, IBM Corporation ï Jean-Luc Gaudiot, University of California, Irvine ï Michael T. Goodrich, University of California, Irvine ï David Harel, Weizmann Institute of Science ï John L. King, University of Michigan ï David J. Lilja, University of Minnesota ï Maja J. Mataric¥, University of Southern California ï David A. Patterson, University of California, Berkeley ï David M. Rocke, University of California, Davis ï John R. Rumble, Information International Associates ï David E. Shaw, D. E. Shaw and Co., Inc. ï James J. Thomas, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory ï Fei-Yue Wang, Chinese Academy of Sciences ï Jeannette Wing, Carnegie Mellon University

Tapia Conference Coverage

Coverage from the Tapia Conference (previous post)...

Former CRA board member John King kicked off the second day of the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing with a diversity focused plenary emphasizing the evolution of cultural context. Using historical examples Dr. King focused on the changes of the last 200 years in the US that show the progression of society in accepting and celebrating the differences between the majority and the minority groups. He emphasized that the context changes the point of view and different points of view provide more information. That is why diversity is so important.

This echoes strongly the plenary given yesterday afternoon by Norman Johnson of Referentia Systems. His talk discussed the importance of mass knowledge and that the knowledge of large groups is often more accurate than the knowledge of issue area experts. Without diversity, that mass knowledge is, in effect, "dumbed-down."

A panel discussing why computing departments fail to retain underrepresented students if universities care about diversity noted the need for role models and emphasis on getting underrepresented students through the first year by building community and accepting cultural differences.

More to come...

Computerworld on Sputnik, DARPA and Computing

Computerworld has fantastic coverage of the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik launch (Oct. 4th, 1957) and why, in a sense, we can thank the Soviets for helping create the conditions that led the U.S. to become the technological superpower we've become.

Computerworld's Gary Anthes' piece "Happy Birthday Sputnik! (Thanks for the Internet)" does a great job of chronicling how the federal government's reaction to the surprising Soviet launch created an agency and a research funding culture that proved so extraordinarily productive that nearly every billion-dollar sub-sector of the IT economy today bears its stamp. In the process, he checks in with a number of important figures from computer science who note that the productive culture within DARPA responsible for much of that early innovation seems to have waned -- and perhaps isn't even possible today.

Rather than quote snippets from the piece, I'd just encourage you to read all of it -- it's the piece I would've tried to write in honor of Sputnik's 50th if Anthens hadn't (I'm glad he did...it's assuredly better than anything I would've come up with).

Two other portions of the coverage are worth checking out, too. Computerworld did a pretty good job of simplifying the CSTB's "tire tracks" chart that shows the development of technologies from the initial research in university or industry labs to the time the products that resulted became billion-dollar industries.

And there's a good interview with former (D)ARPA director Charles M. Herzfeld on the state of IT research now.

It's all definitely worth a read.

Starting Salaries for CS Grads Continue to Rise

CRA's Jay Vegso has the details of the latest National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) survey on the job market for new graduates, which shows CS graduates among best paid among all majors for 2007. CS grads in 2007 earned an average salary offer of $53,051, a 4.5 percent increase over 2006.

Check out the CRA Bulletin for the full list of degrees and salaries....

CS Profs and the DOD

Long-time readers of this blog, or anyone familiar with CRA's policy efforts, will know that we've spent a lot of time raising concerns about policy shifts at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that have cut university participation rates in DARPA-funded computer science research. In congressional testimony and blog posts, we've pointed out that a shift at DARPA -- a focus on nearer-term efforts with an emphasis on go/no-go milestones at relatively short intervals and an increased use of classification -- has sharply reduced the amount of DARPA-supported research being performed in U.S. universities. In fact, between FY 2001 and FY 2004 (the last year for which we have good data), the amount of funding from DARPA to U.S. universities for computer science research fell by half -- and informal evidence suggests university shares are even lower today.

There are a number of reasons we're concerned about this trend. For one, DARPA's diminished support for university CS leaves a hole in the federal IT R&D portfolio -- both in funding, but maybe more importantly, in the loss of the "DARPA model" of research support. Since the early 1960s, the country (indeed, the world) has reaped the benefits of the diverse approaches to funding IT research represented by the two leading agencies -- NSF and DARPA. While NSF has primarily focused on small grants for individual researchers at a wide range of institutions -- and support for computing infrastructure at America's universities -- DARPA's approach has been to identify key problems of interest to the agency and then assemble and nurture communities of researchers to address them. The combination of models has been enormously beneficial -- DARPA-supported research in computing over the last four decades has laid down the foundations for the modern microprocessor, the internet, the graphical user interface, single-user workstations and a whole host of other innovations that have made the U.S. military the best in the world, driven the new economy, changed the conduct of science and enabled whole new scientific disciplines.

But DARPA's policy shift also impacts its own mission, which is to ensure the U.S. never again suffers the sort of technological surprise marked by the Soviet launch of Sputnik (which motivated the establishment of the agency nearly 50 years ago). DARPA's move away from support of university researchers means that many of the brightest minds of the country (indeed, the world) are no longer working on defense-related problems. This loss of mindshare -- the percentage of people working on DARPA-related problems -- is very worrisome to those in the community who understand how much of America's advantage on the battlefield (and in the marketplace) is owed to a network-centric strategy. I hear concerns from the "old guard" in many of America's top university CS departments that there's a whole generation of young researchers who have no experience working with DARPA or the Defense Department and who are not attuned to defense problems -- a fact that doesn't bode well for the future of the U.S. technological advantage and DARPA's goal of preventing technological surprise.

To their credit, the folks at DARPA recognize that this lack of awareness among younger faculty of the types of problems DARPA would really like to solve is a situation that needs addressing. And one way they're approaching the problem is very direct -- they're finding young faculty with research areas of interest to the agency and, well, taking them on a little tour of the DOD. The Computer Science Study Group, run by the Institute for Defense Analysis for DARPA, serves to "acclimate a generation of researchers to the needs and priorities of the DOD," by mentoring, holding workshops, field trips to DOD facilities and fairly elaborate (and pretty kewl) show-and-tells. An interesting article today on Rensselaer ECSE professor Rich Radke's experience has some details on CSSG goals and methods:

The multi-year program familiarizes up-and-coming faculty from American universities with DoD practices, challenges, and risks. Participants are encouraged to view their own research through this new perspective, and then to explore and develop technologies that have the potential to transition innovative and revolutionary computer science and technology advances to the government.

"The basic idea is to expose young faculty to Department of Defense-related activities, via briefings by military and intelligence officers and ‘field trips’ to military and industrial bases," Radke said. "It is truly a hard-core experience filled with days of interesting briefings and up-close show-and-tell with vehicles and equipment."

2007 was the first year for the CSSG and the $4.5 million program supported about a dozen young researchers. DARPA has requested an increase in the program for FY 08 ($7 million) and FY 09 ($7.7 million), so hopefully we'll see that number start to rise.

The DARPA CSSG program is one part of addressing the overall problem. The larger concern is the importance of bringing DARPA back into the university research fold -- not because it would benefit academic researchers, but because it impacts the mission success of the Department of Defense (and hence our national security). A number of factors suggest that maybe it's time to focus on the goal of increasing mindshare of the best brains working on U.S. defense-related problems. For one, because of U.S. visa policies, increasingly the best minds in the world won't necessarily be coming to the U.S. Second, the research capacity of our potential adversaries increases daily. And finally, the increase in foreign investment in U.S. university research departments means that competition for U.S. university mindshare is only increasing, and in some cases, maybe from countries we'd rather not gain a competitive leg-up on us. So, programs like CSSG are really important. But maybe so are some bigger policy issues across the agency....

PCAST Report on the Federal Networking and IT R&D Program Released

The long-awaited follow-up review of the NITRD program -- the first since the 1999 PITAC report Investing in Our Future -- has been released and is available from the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy. It's called Leadership Under Challenge: Information Technology R&D in a Competitive World (pdf). We've discussed in depth a draft version of the report previously, but this final version is far more fleshed out.

We'll have more after we've had a chance to look at it more thoroughly. But if you don't have time to read the whole thing, you can just check out the back cover, upon which are printed the committee's four overarching recommendations:

To sustain U.S. leadership, the Federal government should:

Address the demand for skilled IT professionals by revamping curricula, increasing fellowships, and simplifying visa processes.

Emphasize larger-scale, longer-term, multidisciplinary IT R&D and innovative, higher-risk research

Give priority to R&D in IT systems connected with the physical world, software, digital data, and networking

Develop and implement strategic and technical plans for the NITRD Program

Update: (9/14/07) -- PCAST IT Subcommittee Co-Chair (and CRA Chair) Dan Reed, one of the principal authors of Leadership Under Challenge, has posted his take on the new report. Definitely worth a read.

Previously:

President's Remarks on Research and Innovation

President Bush yesterday presented awards to the 2005 and 2006 National Medal of Science and Technology Recipients, and in his remarks reiterated his support for a strong federal role in support of fundamental research. There's no guarantee, of course, that the President's strong support now will help alleviate the coming appropriations meltdown (that could threaten science funding gains), but at least it appears that his heart is in the right place. The full remarks are here, but I thought I'd just highlight a bit of them:

The work of these Laureates demonstrates that innovation is vital to a better future for our country and the world. In America, the primary engine of innovation is the private sector. But government can help by encouraging the basic research that gives rise to promising new thought and products. So that's why I've worked with some in this room and around our country to develop and propose the American Competitiveness Initiative. Over ten years, this initiative will double the federal government's commitment to the most critical, basic research programs in physical sciences. Last year the Congress provided more than $10 billion, and that's just a start. And I call on leaders of both political parties to fully fund this initiative for the good of the country.

Maintaining our global leadership also requires a first-class education system. There are many things that American schools are doing right -- including insisting on accountability for every single child. There are also some areas where we need to improve. And so as members work to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act, one of their top priorities has got to be to strengthen math and science education.

One way to do that is to create an "adjunct teachers corps" of math and science professionals all aiming to bring their expertise into American classrooms. It's not really what the aim is -- the aim is to make it clear to young Americans that being in science and engineering is okay; it's cool; it's a smart thing to do. And so for those of you who are involved with inspiring youngsters, thank you for what you're doing. I appreciate you encouraging the next generation to follow in your footsteps. And I ask that Congress fully fund the adjunct teacher corps, so you can have some help as you go out to inspire.

One of the many reasons that I am an optimistic fellow, and I am, is because I understand that this country is a nation of discovery and enterprise. And that spirit is really strong in America today. I found it interesting that one of today's Laureates, Dr. Leslie Geddes, is 86 years old and continues to teach and conduct research at Purdue University. Even more interesting is what he had to say. He said, "I wouldn't know what else to do. I'm not done yet." (Laughter.)

He's right. He's not done yet, because the promise of science and technology never runs out. With the imagination and determinations of Americans like our awardees today, our nation will continue to discover new possibilities and to develop new innovations, and build a better life for generations to come. And that's what we're here to celebrate.

CISE Awards Distinguished Education Fellow Grants

NSF’s CISE Directorate awarded the first two Distinguished Education Fellow grants today to Dr. Owen Astrachan and Dr. Peter Denning. The awards are part of the CISE Pathways to Revitalized Undergraduate Computing Education (CPATH) program that CISE began last year.

New CISE Assistant Director Jeannette Wing said that CISE supports the revitalization of undergraduate education in computer science because the community needs to show that computing is about more than programming or a machine in order to attract the best minds to the field.

Astrachan, of Duke University, received his grant to explore case-based approaches to teaching computer science. Denning, of the Naval Postgraduate School, received his grant to focus on defining the principles of computer science and to distill the principles into modules that can be used in teaching.

Both awards are $250,000 grants over 2 years.

CRA at CNSF Exhibit on Hill

CRA participated once again in the Coalition for National Science Funding's annual Science Exposition on Capitol Hill last week and it was a great success. The event, a science fair for Congress and staff, had 35 booths manned by researchers representing universities and scientific societies featuring some of the important research funded by the National Science Foundation. This year CRA was ably represented by Lydia Kavraki, a computer science professor from Rice University, whose research into using computational tools to solve problems in a range of areas such as biology was a hit with all those who stopped at the booth.

The exhibit drew a record crowd with 493 attendees, 11 of whom were members of Congress such as Rep. Dan Lipinski (IL) who stopped to talk to Dr. Kavraki about her work. There were also a number of NSF staff members and a large contingent of Congressional staff, particularly from the House Science and Technology Committee.

As we’ve stated before in this space, personal visits to members of Congress and their staff are vital to getting the message about the importance of computing research out. CRA holds or participates in Congressional visit days several times throughout the year and we are always looking for participants. If you are interested in coming to Washington to visit your Representative and Senators, please contact Melissa Norr at mnorr at cra.org.

Cyber Security Report Released

The National Research Council of the National Academies of Science released a new report on cyber security and research called "Toward a Safer and More Secure Cyberspace." The report is available for free online at the National Academies Press.

The report lists three broad categories that lack of cyber security falls into:

First is the threat of catastrophe-a cyberattack, especially in conjunction with a physical attack, could result in thousands of deaths and many billions of dollars of damage in a very short time. Second is frictional drag on important economic and security-related processes. Today, insecurities in cyberspace systems and networks allow adversaries (in particular, criminals) to extract billions of dollars in fraud and extortion-and force businesses to expend additional resources to defend themselves against these threats. If cyberspace does not become more secure, the citizens, businesses, and governments of tomorrow will continue to face similar pressures, and most likely on a greater scale. Third, concerns about insecurity may inhibit the use of IT in the future and thus lead to a self-denial of the benefits that IT brings, benefits that will be needed for the national competitiveness of the United States as well as for national and homeland security.

It also lists a set of ten provisions that could form a Cyber Security Bill of Rights. The provisions are:

I. Availability of system and network resources to legitimate users.
II. Easy and convenient recovery from successful attacks.
III. Control over and knowledge of one's own computing environment.
IV. Confidentiality of stored information and information exchange.
V. Authentication and provenance.
VI. The technological capability to exercise fine-grained control over the flow of information in and through systems.
VII. Security in using computing directly or indirectly in important applications, including financial, health care, and electoral transactions and real-time remote control of devices that interact with physical processes.
VIII. The ability to access any source of information (e.g., e-mail, Web page, file) safely.
IX. Awareness of what security is actually being delivered by a system or component.
X. Justice for security problems caused by another party.

Attracting Women to Computer Science

While we see articles about the decline of computer science majors, particularly women, almost daily, the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting piece (sub. req’d.) about what a couple of universities are doing to attract and retain women in computer science programs.

Lucy Sanders of the National Center for Women in Information Technology has perhaps the key quote in the piece about the problem of recruiting and retaining computer science majors. "You walk into an intro class, and you start learning a programming language that eventually gets a machine to spit out a string of numbers," says Lucy Sanders, chief executive of the women-and-technology center. "That's not what computing is about. Computing is about solving real problems in medicine, or oceanography, and that's what people who do it love. But the intro courses don't teach that at all."

We've also noted on CRA's Computing Research Policy Tumble Log a couple of related articles in the last few days. One from Ars Technica, and another that's an AP story.

Update: The article does confuse enrollment and interest in computing at one point. Interest in computer science as a major among women dropped 70 percent between 2000 and 2005, not actual enrollment....

Frances Allen Honored by House of Representatives

A resolution to honor Frances E. Allen, the 2006 recipient of ACM's A.M. Turing Award, passed the House today. House Concurrent Resolution 95 was introduced by Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) and reported out of the House Science and Technology Committee last week.

We wrote about Dr. Allen here when the Turning Award was announced in February. She was the first woman to receive the award since it was first given forty years ago. Dr. Allen was an IBM Fellow at the TJ Watson Research Center.

A press release from the House Science and Technology Committee stated:

H. Con. Res. 95 recognizes her achievements in computer research and development while working at IBM Corporation, and salutes the Turing Award Committee for recognizing the contributions of women to the field of computing.

"It is certainly telling that women, who earn more than half of all undergraduate degrees in this country and make up more than half of the professional workforce, represent only 25% percent of all information technology workers," Woolsey said. "Dr. Allen has been an inspirational mentor to younger researchers and a leader within the computing community and it is clear that Dr. Allen deserves recognition for all of the tireless work she has done to promote women's role in computing."

NY Times on Women's Interest in Computing

The New York Times yesterday had a nice piece on the declining interest of women in computer science, the impact on the field, and some efforts to reverse the trend. Here's a snippet:

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — For decades, undergraduate women have been moving in ever greater numbers into science and engineering departments at American universities. Yet even as they approach or exceed enrollment parity in mathematics, biology and other fields, there is one area in which their presence relative to men is static or even shrinking: computer science.

Women received about 38 percent of the computer science bachelor’s degrees awarded in the United States in 1985, the peak year, but in 2003, the figure was only about 28 percent, according to the National Science Foundation.

At universities that also offer graduate degrees in computer science, only 17 percent of the field’s bachelor’s degrees in the 2003-4 academic year went to women, according to the Taulbee Survey, conducted annually by an organization for computer science research. [That's CRA's survey, by the way...]

Since then, many in the field say, the situation has worsened. They say computing is the only realm of science or technology in which women are consistently giving ground. They also worry that the number of women is dropping in graduate programs and in industry.

They are concerned about this trend, they say, not just because they want to see young women share the field’s challenges and rewards, but also because they regard the relative absence of women as a troubling indicator for American computer science generally — and for the economic competitiveness that depends on it.

Basically, the interest of women in computing has never been lower. In a previous posting, we've described some of the ways the community is trying to address the problem, including hiring an "Image Strategist" to focus on improving the image of computing. (Jill K. Ross is that new strategist and she'll have an update on the efforts of the "Image of Computing National Task Force" in May at a meeting of the National Center for Women & Information Technology in Boulder.) Efforts like those described in the article are also crucially important. The National Science Foundation supports many such efforts in computing under its Broadening Participation in Computing program in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering directorate. (And we've mentioned recently that pending legislation in the House would help programs with the goals of increasing the participation of underrepresented groups in computing such as those supported by BPC (or science and engineering generally) have an easier time getting renewed funding from NSF, as long as they are deemed to be effective.)

We'll keep you informed on the progress of these efforts -- both programmatic and legislative -- in the coming weeks. In the meantime, CRA's Jay Vegso has posted links to some further discussion of the issues cited in the Times piece over at the CRA Bulletin. The Bulletin is a good one-stop shop to lots of data about the state of IT and the IT workforce and pipeline.

Finally, we've got a lot of additional information on the state of the IT workforce over at our IT Workforce page, including:

• Total Employment: US Total vs. Professional IT
• Computing is Where the Jobs Are
• and, Degrees Granted and Job Openings in Broad S&E Fields, 2002-2012, which shows the Department of Labor projections for S&E job growth through 2012, along with projected degree production. (The Bulletin has more detail on the most recent set of projections -- through 2014.)
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Eugene Spafford Honored with ACM President's Award

CRA Board member, Eugene Spafford, has received the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) President's Award for "his long and effective leadership on issues of computer security and policy, professional responsibility, and the Internet." The award, given to only seven previous recipients since 1985, will be presented in June in San Diego. The award is given to those who "have demonstrated their exceptional abilities to advance computing technology and enhance its impact for the benefit of society through generosity, creativity and dedication to their respective missions."

From the press release:

Professor Spafford, considered one of the most influential leaders in information security, is being cited for his extensive and continuing record of service to the computing community, including major companies and government agencies. He was a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) from 2003-2005. He was also a senior advisor to the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Assistant Director of the CISE (Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering) Directorate during the 2003-2004 academic year. In addition, Professor Spafford has been a senior advisor and consultant on security, cybercrime, and policy issues to several agencies, including the U.S. Air Force, the National Security Agency, the Government Accountability Office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of Energy.